Drupal vs Joomla vs Mambo, etc

Does anyone have experience with any of these open source CMSs?

I'm looking into moving our college paper from this awful CMS owned by MTV to one of the above.

I'm concerned about robustness and development ease as we have a rotating door of student workers.

they are all a pain the ass

well, mambo is a big pain the ass, joomla I haven't used, drupal is okay, but they are all a big pain when it comes to 'ease of interface customization" IMO.

I suppose I'm less concerned with ease of back-end customization than I am with ease of user interface. People who know nothing about the Web need to be able to go in and do a lot, easily. If it takes the programmers awhile to set it up, that's fine. As long as it's secure, stable and easy to use from the front end, I'm happy.

Our current outside-vendor software is not easy to use from either end and gives us no room for any customization.

I only have experience with Drupal and it's almost infinitely customizable though painful to actually customize. It's got a big active userbase though, and many things you may want to have in your site have probably already been written and and are available as modules.

yeah by customization I meant "put a nice design on it". if you're happy enough with the stock options these thing provide, then it's best; don't, by any means, have some other design in mind first and then try to shoehorn it into your system, it doesn't work that way.

Mambo was very very rigid about information hierarchies and architecture, in my experience, for instance. If you weren't setting your site up with a certain number of categories, etc, then you were kind of screwed.

Drupal definitely has the biggest userbase now and lots of useful modules get created for it all the time.

I wonder if, for some basic things, just using wordpress would be easier? I've looked into this for 2 projects, one a big website that needs lots of features, and the other a redesign of my record label's site, bringing me into the futuristic world of databases. For the former, I think I need something more powerful and custom, software-wise, but for the latter, I imagine just smart usage of categories and pages in wordpress, I can come up with a really easy website.

wordpress is relatively easy in integrate and easier to customize, design-wise, yeah. I think if you basically need an easy way to update a site, WP is the way to go; if you need multiple user accounts, forums, etc, then go for something else.

The wordpress code page is an abomination if you need to do anything really tricky.

er s/page/base/ ; I was just thinking about character set collations.

on't, by any means, have some other design in mind first and then try to shoehorn it into your system, it doesn't work that way.

This is good to know.

Design is secondary to having a truly robust system. Our print version is a daily with a circulation of 70k and the print and Web are entirely supported by ad revenue. We must be able to insert and manage ads, have content updated throughout the day (as opposed to by issue), video, blogs, forums, etc. etc.

I'm nervous about doing this via a free open source system but it seems several large papers use Drupal.

I'd be nervous not doing it on a free open system.

Elaborate, please.

I'm starting to feel that way too but need a good argument for my higher-ups as why we should invest in permanent programming staff (as opposed to student workers) over an out-of-the-box solution.

any "out of the box" solution is going to create vendor lock-in.

i am stuck doing exactly what I said earlier was a bad idea: shoehorning an existing design into a joomla site. why do I do this to myself?

i've been using drupal 6 recently to do some online book publishing (i.e., web pages in a "book" hierarchy) and it's pretty simple and intuitive and easily customizable etc etc.

I cannot yet speak to how customizable it is, because I just installed it yesterday, but I am very much liking the way Drupal is set up. From what I understand, the main bitch about it is the "steep learning curve." (That and backwards compatibility, but I haven't run into that frustration just yet.) I think Wordpress is much harder to use.

The wordpress code page is an abomination if you need to do anything really tricky.
― html tsar (Catsupppppppppppppp dude 茄蕃)

Tricky, hell. It's frustrating just to make basic changes. "Lesse... they opened four tags in the header, closed two of them in the body... I think... and the rest in the footer... unless you're using this other layout, which means then you have to call this other module before the footer or it breaks... I guess I'll draw a diagram." Heavens. The only way Wordpress is easier is if you never actually touch the code. Or if you take it all apart and rewrite it all yourself, but who needs a CMS to do that? I digress.

i am stuck doing exactly what I said earlier was a bad idea: shoehorning an existing design into a joomla site. why do I do this to myself?
― akm

Ha! Well, if you're like me, it's because if you don't learn the hard way, you don't learn at all. I'm shuffling my old, nearly forgotten Movable Type blog over to Drupal just as a learning exercise. Practice, like. (I have a client who needs Drupal templates built -- it's mostly HTML and CSS work -- and I was all like, "Sure, I can do that!" while avoiding mentioning that I had never used Drupal before. Whatever, I told no lies.)

Anyway, I like it. I can think of a couple of sites I really should have built with it.

Been talked into learning Drupal, at least it seems like the best of the three mentioned here

I am a total web design novice, but I am going to Drupal Camp tomorrow. I am actually hoping to learn some stuff as a newbie, how can I best prepare? What should I take with me?

Current work website uses joomla, which I really don't love. We're putting it out to tender and have received an interesting-sounding proposal that would use umbraco. I'd never heard of it before - apparently it's open source and built on .net.

Has anyone else used it..?